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Fountains of Youth: The Good, the Bad and the Bizarre

Everyone wants to live longer, and science and consumers try some strange things to push the envelope on 'normal' aging.

We have always been on a quest to stay forever young. Our desire to cheat the natural aging process has resulted in a multibillion dollar vitamin and supplement industry promising never-ending vitality, and diets that entail eating barely anything at all. Scientists — and pseudo-scientists — have developed bizarre ways to slow, stall, or stop aging. Such efforts have become increasingly strange — from freezing the human body to await regeneration, uploading the mind into a computer, or harvesting new body parts as a means to reverse natural wear-and-tear. As health and fitness guru Jack LaLanne once said, "I hate to die; it would ruin my image." Here are eight things humans are doing in pursuit of longevity.

Extreme Calorie Restriction

Living on a severely calorie-restricted diet will lead to vitamin and nutrient deficiencies, right? Surprisingly, some researchers have found that eating significantly less than average every day — 20 to 40 percent less — may actually benefit your overall health and extend your life.

A study on mice, published in the journal Nature in 2013, found that eating either high-fat or low-fat calorie-restricted diets controlled a gut bacteria genus, Lactobacillus, associated with shorter lifespans. In another study, published in PLoS Medicine in 2007, short-term caloric restriction increased the efficiency of mitochondrial DNA in healthy non-obese young adults. Mitochondria are the powerhouses of cells; improving their function may slow the aging process by helping to clear oxidative damage in the body's fats, proteins, and DNA.

Additional studies have found that restricting daily food intake reduced "secondary aging," which is the process of developing chronic age-related health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Anti-Aging Vitamins and Supplements

For decades, consumers have turned to vitamins, minerals, herbs, and other supplements to improve their health, target symptoms of chronic disease, and boost everything from cognition to sexual prowess and athletic performance. Many folks have also taken to popping these over-the-counter pills to cheat time.

Research has linked certain vitamins to increased longevity — and vitamin deficiencies to physical problems in old age. One study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that 65- to 88-year-olds who had vitamin D levels lower than 20 nanograms per milliliter were more likely to have difficulty performing regular daily functions such as sitting up and walking down stairs, compared to those who had regular levels (30ngm/ml and higher). Other vitamins, minerals, and herbs that some have associated with healthy aging include calcium, vitamin C, vitamin E, ginko biloba, iron, ginseng, and selenium. Several animal studies have linked certain supplements with anti-aging effects. At the University of Florida's Institute of Aging, scientists gave middle-aged, 21-month-old rats supplements that contained the antioxidant coenzyme Q10 and creatine, both of which are said to build muscles. After six weeks, grip strength of these rats improved by 12 percent compared with the controls, while stress tests showed that mitochondrial function improved by 66 percent.

But don't kid yourself — too many supplements can also shorten your life. Vitamin poisoning, also known as hypervitaminosis, can cause serious toxic symptoms, and in some cases, death.

Is That an Ear on That Mouse's Back?

Or a nose on your forehead? Tissue engineering isn't just on the horizon — it's happening right now. And some believe harvesting body parts may be the secret to mending the natural wear-and-tear that occurs in the body over time. At the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, a woman who lost her ear to skin cancer got a new ear that was made by her surgeon. Her doctor fashioned the new ear from rib cartilage, implanted on her arm to grow, then attached it to replace her lost ear. In China, doctors grew a nose, also made from rib cartilage, on a man's forehead to replace the one he lost in a traffic accident.

Tissue engineering has also been used successfully to grow human tissue and organs such as kidneys, a liver, and blood vessels. The process may soon become an alternative to organ transplantation.

Growth Hormone to Keep You Young

Human growth hormone is the drug of choice for some older adults seeking to maintain vitality, à la Lance Armstrong. HGH may help increase bone density and muscle mass, decrease body fat, and bolster athletic endurance. But it also poses significant risks.

A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found a link between HGH use and changes to body composition: People who injected HGH had more soft tissue swelling and joint pain — both linked to aging — than those who did not. Other studies have found HGH to have no effect on health or longevity, and some researchers claim there's a link between high levels of HGH in the body and chronic health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.

Mini Me: The Cloning Option

Why not bequeath your assets to your doppelgänger? Cloning, the process of producing genetically identical organisms, is life extension in a different form. And it may be a viable future option for carrying on your personal legacy. Reproductive cloning has already been used successfully in mammals. In 1996, Scottish researchers successfully cloned the first animal from an adult somatic cell, a sheep they named Dolly, using the process of nuclear transfer. Sadly, Dolly's clone died fairly young. Since then, scientists have made duplicates of other animals, including horses and bulls.

Earlier this year, a team of U.S. and Thai biologists successfully cloned a human embryo using DNA from a person's skin cells in a process similar to that used to make Dolly. However, the researchers said the clone probably couldn't develop into a human, because a similar experiment with cloned monkey embryos did not produce a baby. But the good news is that the cloned human embryo provided viable stem cells, which can be developed into other types of human cells and then used for things such as repairing internal damage from illness and aging.

Eating Your Own Placenta

The idea of a mother eating her own placenta has caused a fair share of hullabaloo. But in many cultures, it's common for a new mother to consume the afterbirth — a practice called placentophagy — because the placenta is considered a superfood that will ward off postpartum depression and increase milk production.

But it's not just new mothers who are taking advantage of the supposed health benefits of afterbirth. Placenta has made its way into pills, creams, masks and other beauty products that promise skin as smooth as a baby's you-know-what.

There may be something to this. The placenta is known to be rich in iron, vitamin B12, and the hormonesoxytocin, prolactin, prostaglandins, and endorphin, and is said to repair damaged cells. A 2010 Chinese study, conducted at Jinan University in Guangzhou, found that mice injected with placenta cells had a median lifespan 1.7 times higher than those who weren't given placenta cells.

The Deep-Freeze Solution: Cryonics

We've entered a new Ice Age. Cryonics — that's Greek for "icy cold" — is the process of preserving humans and animals by freezing them. It's an area of research of particular interest to scientists who study the aging process. The idea behind cryopreservation is that it can stall the progression of terminal or chronic illness and keep potentially viable — albeit frozen in liquid nitrogen — a person for whom current medical options aren't working. Later, the promise goes, you can be defrosted and revived once an effective treatment has been developed.

Fortunately, cryopreservation on living people is not permitted by law. Only someone who is legally dead by current medical standards can be frozen. Preservation requires membership in a cryonics facility, such as the Cryonics Institute in Clinton, Mich., where around 100 bodies are currently on ice, at a one-time cost of $28,000. The nonprofit also offers the option of neurocryopreservation, which refers to removing and freezing only the head to preserve the brain, in the belief that the body can be replaced — either with another human body, or perhaps in the future, with a robot.

Though no cryopreserved human body has ever been defrosted, researchers have revived other living specimens — whole insects, vinegar eels, and human embryos that later became healthy children — that had been frozen in liquid nitrogen for extended periods.

Mind Uploading: Strange Neuroscience

Kenneth Hayworth, PhD, is on a mission to make the brain work forever, long after the body is gone. A senior scientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Va., and president of the Brain Preservation Foundation, Dr. Hayworth is a leader in the field of connectomics, an area of neuroscience that seeks to map the neural pathways of the human brain.

His plan, he said, is to harness this research to develop a way to preserve a digital version of a brain. He calls this "mind uploading": storing the contents of an individual's mind — learned behaviors, information, memories evoked when you smell your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies — in a computer. When this is possible, your dear one's thoughts, consciousness, and unique experiences could live on for eternity in your Apple laptop or in a fancy robot.